


This Is How The Devil Was Born

by dbearlawrence



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: Additional Warnings Apply, Blood, Death, F/F, Mentions of Suicide, Self-Harm, i'm sorry this ended up being so dark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-02
Updated: 2015-08-02
Packaged: 2018-04-12 13:45:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4481489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dbearlawrence/pseuds/dbearlawrence
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Vordenberg told Laura that Carmilla massacred his ancestors. But there must be more to it than that. </p>
<p>(mostly written before 2x18, basically a theory about who Vordenberg is and why he seemed so old)</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Is How The Devil Was Born

_All monsters were once full of light, but it was stolen from them by despair._

When you’re turned into a vampire, you don’t becomeevil instantly. You feel ashamed of who you are at first. You feel the blood-lust in your stomach and your throat, and there is a part of you wanting to do awful things to people; but you’re not a monster, not yet. You try to resist it, at least for a while. But it’s difficult, perhaps impossible, not to become the thing that people see you as.

_-_

_One of the board members. Some guy named Vordenberg._

When Laura mentions him, she tries to shrug it off.

Tries to forget about him. Tries to forget about the barony near her father’s land. Tries to forget about his  _weird family_. What he did. What she did.

He might have helped the newspaper kids – but there’s no way that he’ll speak to them, not if he knows who she is, and he must have figured it out by now.

-

_We wouldn’t even be you and me anymore. We’d just be these empty shells who ran away._

She asks Laura to pretend that they would leave if she asked. Because after the name ‘Vordenberg’ is mentioned, she can’t stop thinking about it. Because at least if there were the possibility of running away from it again, maybe this person’s existence wouldn’t scare her so much.

But Laura is so much better than Carmilla was at the same age, and of course she won’t leave her friends, even if it would save her life. She is determined that she won’t sacrifice anyone else to save herself – so like she was, when she was nineteen, but better, so much better.

-

_Today, gentle viewers, you join me in waiting to meet the elusive Baron Vordenberg._

Carmilla’s eyes shoot up and she stops reading and her face is all fear. Laura didn’t think to try and discuss it first with her first. Didn’t think to ask if she knew anything more about him.

Laura says again that he’s on the Silas Board of Governors. How didn’t she know that? And Mattie… wouldn’t Mattie have told her?

Some things don’t get easier to deal with after three hundred years. She leaves the room but she can still hear his voice through the curtains and she’s surprised because he sounds old, and he  _shouldn’t_ be old, because he was a baby and he was so small, and now he is talking to her girlfriend about how he went looking for immortality and found orange juice instead.

The thought crosses her mind that it might not be him – a descendent, maybe? Maybe not even of him, but of his half-brothers? But there’s something about his voice that tells her it’s him, and she can’t think of any reason why he would be on the board if it weren’t. Half-vampire, half-human. Representing the interests of both sides.

-

_The lesser son of greater fathers._

The eldest of his brothers, but still the lesser. She had let that happen, she had made it happen. He deserved so much better than to be raised as an illegitimate child, to be told that he was the result of some scandalous love affair. Better than him knowing the truth, though, which he must have found eventually. You don’t live to be three hundred and sixteen without questioning why.

She doesn’t want to see him, but she hears a scream and it turns out that the bio major has put J.P. into Will’s body, and she can’t miss that. So she goes out and she examines William, and she barely looks at the man that they are calling Vordenberg.

He looks so much like his father and he is so very old.

So much like his father. He’s cheerful, and a good story-teller. She wants to believe that Laura should trust him, that he’ll help them. But it’s most likely he’s his father’s child – beneath the cheerfulness, there must be something else.

She goes with the bio major to find some blood for their reanimated vampire corpse, and when she comes back he’s talking to Laura again.

-

_She was promised to my great-great-grandfather._

Which was not quite true – but an acceptable lie, considering the situation.

She was to be married to him in the spring. This man, a baron, was about ten years older than her, which, as arranged marriages go, was a fairly small gap. And he did seem nice, though she only met him a couple of times before she died. When they danced, she knew that she could not love him, would never love him as he loved her. But he had many tales to tell, and he appeared to be more pleasant than men, and life with him seemed as though it could be tolerable.

Then, just as luck would have it, she was murdered at a ball three weeks before her wedding. She still doesn’t know who it was who murdered her, but it was Maman who raised her from the dead. When the change was over, she offered Carmilla a life with her, on the condition that she would leave her family and everyone she knew for something else. Somewhere without fathers or husbands - she could leave now and never come back. There would be luxuries and balls, and she would avoid having to marry the man. But there was one drawback - it would be the life of a monster, the life that a monster had given her. 

So when she refused it, and walked away, all Maman said was, ‘Oh, sweetheart, one day you’ll understand why this is necessary. And when you do, I’ll be waiting for you.’

The stab wound had started to heal, but there was still blood dripping from the puncture marks on her neck, which didn’t seem to dry up even though it had been a week, and there was dried blood around her mouth because she had drunk the liquid that Maman had offered her, not knowing what it was, and she couldn’t figure out how to get her fangs to retract. As she walked back to her father’s house, alone, she felt like a corpse and was certain that she must have looked like one. It was no wonder then, that the maid screamed when she opened the door, and that her father had thought her a spectre and had told her to leave the house and never return. It was a fair enough explanation for why your daughter might knock on your door a week after she had died, and a fair enough reason to turn her away. But it didn’t feel fair.

-

_And he loved her._

Love. What a strange word for it.

She went to him because it was the only other place she thought she might have a chance. She washed off most of the blood in a river, and walked to his house. This man, he claimed to love her, and if he did not – then she supposed that being turned away by him could not be worse than being turned away by her own family. And if he rejected her, she resolved that she would find a way to survive on her own, or end her own life.

But he said that he would care for her.

He told her that she could still be his wife, although no one would know.

There was no ceremony. (They wouldn’t be able to find anyone, he told her, who would marry a human with an abomination.) He said that if they spoke to the Lord, and consummated the marriage, that it would be as valid as any other.

And she protested against this, tried to argue that plenty of marriages went unconsummated. But he didn’t appear to listen.

-

_So that when she became a monster, he hid her, and protected her._

When he had gotten what he wanted, he did not just hide her, but shut her away.

Only a fool would call that protection. The room had no windows. She didn’t miss the sunlight, but the stars were gone and she didn’t know if she would ever see them again. They painted the door with a cross and decorated it with garlic, then fitted the door with a lock made of silver, because they didn’t know which myth to believe. Both of her hands were tied loosely to the bed-post, so she split her time between the bed and the floor.

He said that starving her of blood would kill the demon inside of her. But either he was wrong, or she didn’t wait long enough to find out.

Maman visited her in secret. It must have been easy for her, she realises now, to just walk into that house and up to her attic room. She was old enough that she didn’t need to be invited in, and powerful enough that their attempts to ware off those of her kind had no effect on her. But when you’re imprisoned in a place and a situation that comes straight from your nightmares, when you are yourself a creature from your nightmares, it seems like any visitor must have gone through hell to get to you, like any small act of kindness is your life being saved all over again. She would bring blood and kind words and some vision of an end to it all.

Sometimes weeks would pass without her coming. When Maman did not come she would get seizures. When Maman did not come, there was only the darkness, and the pain, and the thirst. She would bite into her own skin, and while it brought a distraction, it never had the same effect as the blood that Maman brought.

After the hunger and the thirst, the worst part was the boredom. She must have been there for nine months, with nothing but her own anxious thoughts of self-hatred. In comparison to the decades that she would later spend in the coffin, it wasn’t that long, really. But the older you get, the quicker time goes – nine months feels almost as much of an eternity to an eighteen-year-old as seventy years does to someone nearing two hundred.  

And the attic room seemed to get smaller, more inescapable, as the thing kept growing inside her. It took her months to realise what was happening to her, and when she did, she began to cry. She had wanted children, someday. Not here though, and not  _his_  children. And if it came from her, she thought, it wouldn’t even be a child, but a beast. Just like her.

-

_And she repaid him by killing all his family, and all those that he loved. Leaving him to die. Alone, and dishonoured._

After it was born, it was taken away from her. She had thought maybe they would let her keep it with her, thought maybe they would be as scared of it as they were of her. But it did not look like a monster to them. The thing had no fangs and it did not cry for blood. Of course, she was the only monster here.

Maman told her that there was a way for them to end it. They could run away together. She would be free from this place, from these people who looked at her as if she were an animal, tried to starve her, and took the thing that she birthed away from her.

All she had to do was kill them. 

‘Kill everyone in the house,’ Maman ordered, ‘and leave the man to suffer alone, as he has made you suffer. When we are finished with him, he will want to die, just as you did.’

It’s one of those things that’s hard to stop once you’ve started. Together, they killed his siblings, his parents, his friends. And they made him watch. One traumatic event for another; it seemed fair.

Between his sobs and through his panicked breath he shouted insults. 

'You’re a monster, Mircalla, and I can’t believe I ever thought you worthy of redemption.’

'My dear,  _dear_  husband – haven’t you realised it yet? This is only revenge. You brought this upon yourself, and if I’m a monster, then it’s only because of you.’

So, after that, they left him to die. But he didn’t die, didn’t kill himself like she had expected. He lived another forty years, he found a wife who did not become a monster after their engagement, who gave him two children. He raised three sons. Three, not two.

(She’d hidden the child at the time of the murders, and convinced her mother that the family had killed it. She had heard one of the maids mention its name, and after that it made it all the more difficult. Cornelius may have been born of monsters, but that did not mean that he had to become one.)

-

_We’re never going to stop Mattie this way._

As if she wanted to stop Mattie. Her sister, her friend. Far better to her than any of her sisters and friends had been in life. She was someone to dance and drink with, but also someone that she trusted – apart from Maman, Mattie was the only person that she’d ever talked to about what had happened.

_Little monster,_ that’s what she called her – but the word 'monster’ had always sounded different from her lips than anyone else’s. It was affectionate. To be called a monster by someone who is, herself, a monster, is not to be called a monster at all, but a friend.

-

_Yeah, it’s hilarious that our best lead won’t help us because you massacred his ancestors._

She wants to scream. If only Laura knew what had happened before that, if only she could tell her.  _B_ _ut_ _I kept him alive, Laura,_ she wants to say _,_ _I wasn’t supposed to let him live, but I did._

She stays quiet, though, because it’s been three hundred years, but that doesn’t make it easy to talk about.

-

_I need the kickass, heroic vampire girlfriend._

But what kind of girlfriend doesn’t trust the girl she loves enough to tell her about her past, even after all they’ve been through together? 

What kind of vampire still feels guilty about something she did over three hundred years ago?

And what kind of hero leaves her own son to be raised by the man who thought her an abomination, and locked her away?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! 
> 
> I don't think that Carmilla is actually going to turn out to be Vordenberg's mother, but once I got the idea I couldn't let it go.
> 
> The title and first line of the first chapter come from this poem that Carmilla posted on her tumblr a few days ago (http://heycarmilla.tumblr.com/post/125323665241/all-monsters-were-once-full-of-light-but-it-was)
> 
> I dislike the trope of female characters being defined solely by an abusive past and having very little personality outside of that, and I realise that’s basically the kind of trap that I fell into when writing this. Oops. Sorry. (but doing that was probably the easiest way to explore the idea of Carmilla being Vordie’s mother)

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! 
> 
> I don't think that Carmilla is actually going to turn out to be Vordenberg's mother, but once I got the idea I couldn't let it go.
> 
> The title and first line of this come from this poem that Carmilla posted on her tumblr a few days ago (http://heycarmilla.tumblr.com/post/125323665241/all-monsters-were-once-full-of-light-but-it-was)
> 
> I dislike the trope of female characters being defined solely by an abusive past and having very little personality outside of that, and I realise that’s basically the kind of trap that I fell into when writing this. Oops. Sorry. (but doing that was probably the easiest way to explore the idea of Carmilla being Vordie’s mother)


End file.
